


Alphabet City

by Tlon



Series: The Razes [3]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Anal Sex, Angst, Class Differences, Dark Solarpunk, Dubious Consent, Dystopia, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M, Flogging, Hell Capitalism, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Male Bonding, Oral Sex, Post-Apocalypse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Precariat, Prisoner of War, Pseudo-Love Triangles, Science Fiction, Slash, Technobabble, Torture, Unhealthy Relationships, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-16
Updated: 2017-02-24
Packaged: 2018-09-18 00:18:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 8
Words: 21,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9353420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tlon/pseuds/Tlon
Summary: The patent war broke Nic Weller: first the sharp snap in a prison camp singled out by a sadistic commander, then the subtle erosion from endless jobs on the margins of the post-apocalyptic California corporate state. A dismal shipping warehouse is his last chance, but he hadn't planned on running into a wealthy expatriate who offers him something better, even if his kindness carries the threat of cruelty. Or a former soldier who accidentally destroyed his life during the war, then saved his sanity on the brink of peace. Or an insane bundle of recorded memories that could give him a way out – if he can balance the attention of his benefactor with a growing affection for his former enemy.





	1. The Jet Falls Synergy Realignment Camp

**Author's Note:**

> As usual for the series, this is a standalone novella set in the same world as _The Pale Machines_ and _House of Wires_. They don't share characters or storylines, so it's not necessary to read them. If you have, though, remember the dysfunctional schizo-tech Seaboard society? Now you get to read about how an entirely new place is similarly, but distinctly dysfunctional: California!

It's almost creepy how little the supervisor behind the desk moves, Nic thinks. He's like some kind of job-dispensing mannequin – put in a dollar and get out a paycard. Not that Nic has a dollar, at least one he can spare.

The man is the last (or at least second-to-last, or third-to-last) barrier between him and the inside of the warehouse metaphorically behind that desk, where Nic desperately wishes he weren't going but desperately needs to be. Everything is desperate these days, from the signature he keys on Michael and Emily's school fees to his cautious footsteps on the edge of the road to this campus, through places that were never meant to be navigated without wheels and steel. He hasn't spoken to someone new in person for weeks, and his desperation is like a wound that he's got to hold while speaking, hoping nobody notices the blood.

The man is asking how familiar Nic is with the position, as if Nic wouldn't have had to read the description fifty times putting in his application. Sorting work, says Nic. Strength and organizational skills required. Just like the Intercorporate Policy Enforcement Division listed on his resume.

“Yeah, you were with IPED, weren't you?” the man repeats. “Where were you stationed?”

That's on his resume too, but Nic doesn't point it out. “I was on an offensive team. Machine interface specialist. During the Intra-Pacific Intellectual Property Licensing Negotiations.” He enunciates every word, avoiding the colloquial _patent war_. “But I spent most of it at a General Resources camp in Idaho.”

For the first time, the man really looks at him – not necessarily with respect, but at least with curiosity. Nic forces himself to wait for the followup questions, the commiseration that he always gets. _Oh God, thank God that's over, right? Was it as hard as it sounded? Came out okay, I guess?_ (The answers were respectively: sure, harder, and a controlled shake of the head, a compromise between the truth and something socially acceptable.) It doesn't come.

“Didn't cripple you, did it?”

“Sorry?”

“Is that why you're here, and not at security or engineering or somewhere...” The man trails off, but it's clear that “somewhere better” was on the tip of his tongue. Nic half-consciously touches a hand to his collar, even though he knows the scars are safely covered.

“Nothing important. I'm fine now.” He listed shell shock, but for once, the application's total unimportance works in his favor. If it didn't automatically screen him out, it's done its job.

“This is hard work. You know that?”

“I can handle it.”

“So can two dozen other people in line for this behind you.”

He forces himself to keep up the blank smile he's worn the entire interview. “I understand. I'm... highly motivated.”

“So what you mean is, you need it. Well, maybe we can work with that. Loyalty is valuable. Loyalty and willingness.”

Something in the man's look disturbs him. “What do you mean, willingness?”

The supervisor's eyes flick over his face and across his chest and shoulders, the twill blazer he's kept carefully stored away for interviews like this. “Stand up,” he says. “Take your jacket off.”

Nic nods, clenching his fists to hide the tremor in his hands. The bright light of the interview room forms a nimbus around the man's head, making his face a cherubic pink oval with the sunken eyes of a cave creature. The man stands and walks around the desk.

Nic swallows panic as a hand comes up to brush his face. Nurses had to sedate him in order to patch him up after liberating the camp in Jet Falls. His back had still been a mess then, the rest of him not much better. But he'd rather have rotted than let anyone touch him again. It was months before he trusted himself to hug Michael and Emily, and there's been no reason to test anything beyond that – not when his life can be counted in shifts at pop-up stores and assembly plants and tech helpdesks that he churns through almost before he can learn their names.

“This is the end of the line for you, isn't it?” the supervisor mutters into his ear. “It's not hard to tell when a man has nowhere else to go. What happens if I throw you out?”

“I'll put in another...”

“Let's test it, then.” His breath burns after the cold of the waiting room. “If you think you've got a better shot somewhere else, you can walk out any time. But a job here... it's yours, if you want it. You just need to make it worth my while.”

*

It had started with Lara.

His sister had never been a master of charisma or a technical savant, but as long as Nic could remember, she had been the one who was _going places_. By the time the first patent suits were filed between Alphanum and General, she was already working her way through the lower echelons of Alphanum management, showing an uncanny knack for weathering interdepartmental power plays and hundred-hour work weeks. She'd married years before a salaryhound was supposed to and managed to survive it, given birth – to twins – without slowing down.

Some people might have envied a sibling like that, but Nic had always been grateful to have someone who fulfilled all his parents' expectations in one neat tactical strike. It had let him linger in graduate programs without guilt, learning the intricacies of machine interfaces by day and of New Frisco bars by night. And it meant he was far away from his family's house in the northern buffer zone when the bomb cars started showing up.

It wasn't his fault, he had told himself over and over – not his fault that he had been falling asleep next to a sleek-bodied deconstructivist accountant when General Resources crudely but effectively tore apart the Weller clan, leaving only Lara's children – at Alphanum boarding school – and Nic himself. But his life had taken on a new weight, as though all the years she should have had had been stacked onto him instead. When hostilities officially began, he left his graduate program for the IPED within the month, along with a tenth of the class. Yes, the money had mattered – the Alphanum shell subsidiary Lara had worked for folded almost as soon as the patent negotiations broke down, leaving her children almost nothing. But far more important was lancing the boil of impotent hatred that had festered since her death, first through the austere death-bringing of autoplane warfare and then, as General's grip over its war machine faltered, the lush barbarism of sabotage marches into enemy territory.

Then had come Jet Falls.

He couldn't remember his division's surrender, didn't even know how it had happened. He recalled an ambush, remembered seeing skewed limbs and pooling blood. Reflected that the volume of material underneath the human skin was like a hideous alien landscape, as gunfire rang in his ears. Then somehow everything was over, and they had left the dead to desiccate in the scrublands, under the harsh sun of the fading summer.

Nic wasn't sure what he should have expected, but it wasn't the primitive corrugated metal and razor wire that lined the Jet Falls Synergy Realignment Camp, nor the shipping-crate cages they were locked into. His division was spread across the camp – to discourage cohesion, one of the prisoners they threw Nic in with muttered. Divide and conquer. Someone else tried to explain it with Sun Tzu, but of course none of them had read Sun Tzu, only the proverbs that Alphanum managers put on quarterly earnings reports. They whispered requests for news on the negotiations, and Nic recalled them as clearly as his shaken mind could manage. And they warned him: _keep quiet. Let her think she's won._

Nic didn't know who _she_ was. None of it still felt quite real; it was like living through a tall tale from a college cocktail mixer flirtation, the kind of thing that would make a partner lean in with wide eyes and a knowing smile, acknowledging that what they were hearing might be either gospel truth or utter bullshit, and it didn't matter either way. Nic acted his part imagining how it would turn out a few months from then – because it couldn't be that long until Alphanum traded them out, could it?

Kinski, was what they called her, although Nic never knew her first name – the guards never called her anything but _boss_ , when she was around. He met her a few days into captivity, when a pair of GR negotiators dragged him into a low-slung building where the cinderblock walls were stained with mildew and knocked him to his knees. The man stamped a foot on his leg to keep him in place as the door opened, and Kinski – dark-haired, not tall but broad – appeared.

“Up,” she said curtly.

Nic hesitated, and she struck him backhanded, leaving him with the taste of blood on his teeth. He pushed himself unsteadily to his feet, keeping his eyes on the cement floor.

“Look at me.”

He raised his head.

“Do you find this place backwards?”

He knew the right answer, but it wouldn't stay on his tongue. “Not before now.”

“I see.” She drove a foot into his ribs, but he realized, oddly, that as much as it hurt he could tolerate it far better than he might have a year ago. “You think we're – stupid hoverthrough trash? That you're better – than – us?” She punctuated each word with a kick.

His lungs could barely take in air, but he managed to spit blood back at her. Cocktail mixer, he thought. It was all going to be over soon, and for now, the only thing he had to keep was his pride. God damn it, he would come out of this with something to tell the kids about. “I don't know. But stereotype threat... seems like a problem for you, you kno--”

The punch shook his thoughts apart, and he swayed and toppled to the floor. His ears were ringing too badly to hear what she said to the negs, but he caught the word that she leaned to whisper in his ear: _pathetic_. He tried to come up with something to say back, but before he could do it, they were pulling him away.

If he had known what was ahead, would have have done it differently? He can't let himself think about the answer.


	2. The Exploding Silisteel Inevitable

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A-Side: The hiring practices of subsidiary businesses are often less professional than those of flagship brands. It is generally safest to trust no one, anywhere, ever.
> 
> B-Side: Intellectual property disputes of the future involve a great variety of war crimes. Nic has learned this. The man who foils his escape attempt has not.

The supervisor can't damage him, Nic tells himself, or he can't too badly. He can only push Nic to his knees and open his slacks and wait, one hand in Nic's hair. It's a kind of power Nic can at least pretend he's acquiesced to – he can tell himself that this is nothing, only a transaction.

He manages to steady himself long enough to take the man into his mouth and close his eyes. The man runs his fingers through his hair and down his cheekbone, and he hates that almost more. But he knows that the supervisor is right – he can't wait for another job. He's known guns and planes and other implements that kill at the pull of a trigger, and all it's taken to overpower him is money.

The supervisor shifts, and Nic tries to pretend he isn't gagging, hands shaking at his sides. He wonders how many people the man has done this to, torn between hoping no one else has had to endure it and hoping that he's not alone – not uniquely vulnerable, even if he feels it right now. He knows from experience that he should work to get it over with, but he can't make himself do it. The man is lucky that he's clearheaded enough not to bolt or fight out of instinct, Nic thinks. Although maybe he's kidding himself that he'd do either one. After all, it's not as if he did before.

The man comes and Nic draws away as soon as he's free. He's no longer panicked, only numb. He watches a pair of sharp black shoes disappear behind the desk and checks that his jacket is still clean.

“Hey.”

He looks up. The supervisor passes a terminal pad across the desk and smiles slightly.

“Be here at five tomorrow. You'll get your badge then.”

Nic nods and signs, not bothering to read the contract above the line. His chest aches with pent-up despair and fury, and once he's taken his things and checked out of the campus he longs to scream at the empty road, pummel the chilly cement barriers. But that will only make it worse, like pumping air on a fire. So he just stares ahead and walks until the ache has spread itself thin around his body, where it stays like a caul – stifling, but bearable.

*

He talked to the others in camp as little as possible, because it made the prison feel less real and less permanent. Tomorrow, he always thought, when someone complained about the cold or the scant food. Someone would come tomorrow.

It was hard to keep that in mind when Kinski needled him – said something stupid just to bait him and then sat back and watched while the negs beat him down for either replying or ignoring her. He pushed fellow prisoners away when they told him to keep quiet, although he wondered if some of them liked having her attention off the rest of them. This lasted until the pilot found him.

_Finally, somebody with guts_ , he said, and in retrospect Nic should have run away right there. He definitely should not have listened to him whisper that he had gotten the key to General's coded transmissions, that all it would take was a few alarms unset and they could be out, ready to take them to Alphanum. “Maybe be heroes,” he said. “Maybe end the war.”

At first Nic just put him off – the right choice, the safe one. Except that someone must have seen them, and Kinski called him into the interrogation building and shocked him until he wouldn't have stood a chance of answering her questions about what they'd been saying. When she relented and threw him out, he crawled around the side of the block and huddled there just until he could stand. Then limped back to the cages to find the pilot, who sported his own swollen eye and bloody nose. Nic shouldn't have trusted him. But he was too angry – at Kinski, at General – to care.

They made their break two nights later. The pilot climbed the wall. Nic didn't.

He was so damn close, just a few meters, when he heard the call to stop. In the dim light, he turned and saw the gun raised at him. The man behind it couldn't have been older than he was, dark-skinned, tall but lanky. Nic made the calculus: was that the sort of man that would actually shoot him? And did he care?

The neg gripped his rifle harder. “Don't move!”

Nic had nowhere to run, no way to fight back. He tried the last thing he could think of: he raised his arms and stepped forward, coming close enough to see the man's long straight nose and deep-set eyes.

“Please,” he whispered. “Don't take me back.”

The man paused, apparently nonplussed. Then he shook his head curtly. “Come on.”

“No, wait – you can just walk away. Just pretend you didn't see.”

“You know I can't do that.”

“They're going to kill me if you turn me in. Or worse.”

The man raised his shoulders uncomfortably. “I'm... sorry. But you're talking about treason. If you come on your own free will, that's the best this can possibly go.” He looked straight at Nic and slowly lowered his gun. “You don't have a choice,” he said. “Neither of us do.”

Nic walked ahead of him back to the central block, both of them silent. He barely made it there when he was blindsided by another guard, kicked to his knees and handcuffed.

He tried to keep his mind blank of everything, even hate, when they pushed him into a cell. _Hate will give you purpose_ , they'd said in departmental training. But it only made him feel even more helpless. Even if it wasn't Alphanum policy, he didn't want to spend what might be his last night like that.

He tried to think of his sister's children, remind himself that he'd done his part to help them. But it felt hollow. Maybe if the pilot was right, and he'd gotten information out that would help end the negotiation – maybe that would do it. Otherwise... what had he accomplished? Helping take the lives of a few people he'd never met, before dying caged in the nowhere flats of a dead town?

Well someone, he told himself, had to die in them.

The sun rose, and he squinted up as the door opened.

“Are you going to kill me?” he asked, surprised at the steadiness in his voice.

The neg looked at him with something approaching pity. “Not for a long time.”

They set the post in the center of the camp, medieval, cuffed his hands to it so all he could see was flaking green paint over its rusted metal. The sun was already high, and he absently thought of his parents' description of the old world, passed on from their own families. Of the country before Alphanum and General, of the towers of San Francisco before the Razes, before the sun burned quite so hot. _It's a harder world you inherited_ , his mother had told him once. He hadn't understood what she meant.

He wasn't sure he did, still – he'd read enough in college to know the atrocities that older generations sanctioned. But that didn't change the heat, or the post, or the footsteps behind his back.

Kinski didn't hold the whip. But she made sure to let him know she was watching. At first he tried to stay conscious, to at least make the prisoners she'd gathered think he was strong – even if under it all, he was still a student, not a soldier. By the time she'd sneered at him to _wake up, darling_ , he'd stopped caring. He was barely sensate when she ran her hand over his back, undid the cuffs with bloodslick fingers and let him drop.

At least they didn't try to make him walk. Two of the negs propped him and dragged him after her, steps moving from dirt to metal. A door turned on its hinges, and he raised his head dully to see a room – a real apartment, the kind of place he hadn't seen for months.

“Put him on the bed.”

He was so badly off that all he registered was the softness of the mattress and the strange, chemical scent of the sheets, and the small mercy that they hadn't dropped him on his back. Then he felt Kinski's weight on him, and her hands on his remaining clothes.

“I could have had you tied down for this,” she told him. “I probably will, later. But I want you to know that you weren't captive the first time. That you could get away, if you were stronger or quicker than I am. That you lost because whatever you thought you had over us when you came out here... when it comes right down to it, you're nothing.”

She didn't fuck him that day, either. But she watched.

When the men were done with him she sat on the bed and rolled him onto his side, while he gritted his teeth and tried not to react. She looked down and put a hand under his cheek, lifting his face toward her.

“I hope you never get used to this,” she whispered. “I want to see you wake up terrified and confused over and over, watch you figure out why it hurts so bad.” She pushed him onto his back, and this time he screamed, trying in vain to throw her off. “I want to see you remember why you hate me.”

He would remember, that he promised himself. He forced his eyes open when she walked away, and peeled his bloodied body away from the mattress. He was past pain; it had worked its way into his bones so completely that it gave him strength. Kinski was across the room, head down over her desk. This was important. It was not as important as the table near the bed, where gray meat of indeterminate origin lay half-dissected on a plate, the knife that had done it still balanced off one edge. Nic managed to get a hold of it silently before his body lost its newfound tolerance for suffering and nearly shut down.

Meditation was prized by Alphanum, which often suggested it in place of medical care and sleep. Aphanum's military meditation courses emphasized that focusing on a goal was often counterproductive. The correct alternative was to shape one's thoughts so that nothing existed but the goal. To make it invisible, omnipresent, and – thus – inevitable. There was no direction to go but across the room, no way to do it but with the knife gripped in one hand. In that final surge of not-focus, he managed to stand and raise his arm behind Kinski's neck.

Kinski flinched at the last second and ducked, slipping out of her chair. The reality in which silisteel sank into her flesh collapsed like wet paper around the one where she looked up with something between anger and admiration and twisted Nic's wrist down until he screamed.

“So it's going to be that way, is it?”

Kinski's negs dragged him into one of the long canvas tents of GR's improbably-sized negotiation squads – there must have been dozens of them stationed in Jet Falls, like they wanted to overcome Alphanum with sheer meat. Their faces flicked like terminal screens between surprise, contempt, and apprehension.

“Bastard tried to stab me in the back,” Kinski said in the loud, offhand voice of a woman hoping to be overheard telling a funny story in a bar. “Only act of war we've seen all month, right?” She laughed. “Don't kill him, boys. Not quite.”

Kinski left behind an uncomfortable lull. This kind of thing was unfamiliar to them, Nic thought. Maybe they wouldn't be able to go through with it. But he felt a calloused hand push him to a cot and closed his eyes before the weight of a body followed, gritting his teeth when it reopened the wounds on his back.

A few of them muttered encouragement: _Bet you he'll have him crying in five minutes. About time Alphanum got fucked._ There was a sickening familiarity – the same sort of contempt that they had used to allay their nagging fears about General's power, back in training. 

“I had a girl, you know,” the man whispered in his ear. “She worked in a goddamn hospital. Do you want to know what happened to her?”

Nic said nothing, but he thought he already did – that in some way, he'd known since the day he joined, suppressing the thought of a thousand General-born Laras struck down just as his was.

“You motherfuckers killed her.” The knife traced a faint line down his neck. “Bombed the whole fucking place. Medical patent violation, they said.” A knee thudded into his ribs. “Wonder how many of us got the same story?”

“I'm sorry,” Nic said. “My sister-”

“Yeah, I bet you are, now. Don't want to hear your excuses. But if you wanna make it up to me...”

Nic had no fight left in him. He pressed his face to the cot's bedding so they wouldn't hear his cries, until they'd all gotten what they wanted from him, leaving him broken and clammy with their sweat and his blood. By the time one of Kinski's men arrived, every step back to her room was agony.

She looked him over with hungry disdain when he fell at her feet, eyes lingering on the rising bruises and bites along his arms and neck. “Would you like,” she asked, “to come back to me?”

Nic swallowed the hatred that thickened more every moment Kinski held his gaze. “Yes,” he whispered.

“Not going to have any more trouble?”

A half-dozen ill-formed murder plans went through his head. “No.”

“I don't like second chances. Maybe I should send you over to the boys again.”

Something cold was eating him from the heart outwards, chewing away until all that was left was the shell of him kneeling at Kinski's feet. “Please,” he said, trying to stop his voice from breaking. “I'll do anything.”

Kinski had a limited view of _anything_. She wanted to slap him and force his face onto her crotch and keep herself on the brink of orgasm as she murmured abuse, one hand wandering across Nic's wounds. She wanted to take out half-articulated frustrations and tell him to _shut up, you worthless fucking Alphanum... _and then let her voice fade as if she'd forgotten which philippics she had held in store for the end of the sentence.__

__“That's going to get infected,” she said afterward, tapping one of the lash strokes. “You should get it looked at.”_ _

__She had arranged for even mercy to be cruel – called a couple of clinicians and told them to treat him without anesthetic. Their disinfectant replaced his blunt pulses of hurt with a pain that was gleaming and sharp, unbearable in its purity, until he begged them quietly for anything to dull it._ _

__“For God's sake, what have they done to him?” one of them muttered. “Looks like he's been through a wringer.”_ _

__The response was too quiet to hear._ _

__“No. We wouldn't – nobody would do something like that. Nobody decent.”_ _

__“I heard somebody talking about it in Bravo. And just look at him.” The man touched a finger to one of the bite marks on Nic's shoulder. “Nobody decent – we're hurting him now, ain't we?”_ _

__Nic felt the first clinician lean close and flinched, preparing to feel another set of teeth or hands. But he only whispered: “You can't tell anyone if we help you, okay?”_ _

__Nic shook his head as much as he was able, and the man pricked his arm. “I don't care what you did,” the man said from behind an expanding cushion of euphoria. “We're not – we're not supposed to be monsters.”_ _

__Kinski kept him chained to the bed for another day, hungry and exhausted. Nic spent the time carving down his image of himself. He was not the dilettante child proud of his budding technological aptitude, nor the IPED's weapon. He was not the man who could meet the touch of another human being with easy affection, who could take for granted the freedom of something as simple as walking along the iron coastline of New Frisco. He was a wretched thing that shrunk from light, a wraith whose only victories were inspiring pity, whose only dreams were solitude and invisibility._ _

__He was not nothing. As Kinski occupied his hands and mouth, or straddled him and coaxed him into unwelcome response so she could mount him, nothing was his highest aspiration._ _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those following along, the patent war was a minor plot point in _House of Wires_ , although it was only referenced in backstory.


	3. At the War's End

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A-Side: Even in a corporate culture that is sociopathic by necessity, kindness is possible. Nic is helped for the second time by a man he wants to hate.
> 
> B-Side: The last move of a petty tyrant is to recreate in miniature what she has lost at scale. Nic survives it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, I always get so nervous posting these. Thanks to the people who have left comments/kudos! We'll be just about through the darkest stuff after this chapter, so you can at least look forward to a break from all the unrelenting horrors.

He will barely ever need to go through security, they tell him. After that he will be living in the warehouse dormitories, and although they don't say it, the loss retention specialists rightly assume that if he's working here he has nowhere else to go, and no money to go there with. This isn't even an Alphanum colony directly, it's a subcontractor with a name designed to slip off the brain – Fulfillment Intercounty or Ship Now, designations almost as ugly and bland as General Resources. Nic mulls possible names to himself as he peels off his clothes and tries not to notice the lossers gawking at his scars.

They sell him a uniform on credit, although that name gives it too much weight. It's just unmarked pants, a light jacket, and a dark shirt, short-sleeved to bear the heat in the summer but not so skimpy that it will shock the occasional visiting Eastern Seaboard executive's Edwardian sensibilities. It could always be worse, he reminds himself – he could be out East instead. Although even the Seaboard hadn't been stupid enough to get into something like the patent war.

Nic quells the thought as he clips on his wristbadge. When its numbers tick over and the day begins he has no time to think of anything but pure logistics, following the path it projects from item to item. At some warehouses he's worked at, he could imagine what recipients would do with the arrangements of things he picked, calculator animals and bags of flavored vitamin and the occasional discreet sex toy. Everything here is already brown-wrapped for shipping, though, labeled only by number. Soon the rhythm of it is almost as soothing as it is frantic, turn after turn, digit after digit, to the steady hum of the little autocopters that take packages after they've found them.

The badge shocks him to let him know it's midshift, and it points him toward the canteen, where he gratefully starts off to. Outside it'll be high noon, although it's difficult to tell through the windows of the warehouse. They level all light to a kind of dirty gray glow, like the heraldic beams of a sullen angel.

He's looking so intently at his badge that he doesn't notice the supervisor standing in his way until he nearly walks into him. “Lunch break?” he says brightly. “Take a few minutes off with me.”

The last of the machine rhythm fades, and human demands come crashing back to Nic. He tries not to let the disappointment show when he follows the supervisor into his back room and kneels for him again, lets him rough his hair and moan affectionate insults that seem directed at no one in particular. This time some of Jet Falls comes back to Nic, and he works the man's shaft with his tongue, trying to make him come faster – maximal efficiency; Alphanum should be happy. It works well enough that he has time to wash the taste of sex out of his mouth with a few gulps of water and protein the consistency of tackboard.

The second half of the day won't settle back into the peaceful oblivion of the first. It's too hard to forget that the work he's doing – the endless, ligament-ripping pull of boxes – isn't even what he was hired for. He meets quota by grimly counting steps by the dozen, over and over, until the badge agrees to let him out and he heads for the door.

“Hey,” he hears behind him. “You new?”

Nic turns but doesn't answer. It's a trio of men in the same badges and uniform as him. “Course he's new,” says another. “And he's fucking the boss.”

The first man takes an exaggerated look at him. “Yeah, I can see it,” he says. “Bet you he works easier than us.”

Nic makes to leave, but the man grabs his wrist and twists it toward him, looking at the badge. The quota number seems to deflate whatever he was going to say, but he pulls Nic in, until Nic can feel his heavy breath. “Well, you got nowhere else to be, do you?”

Without thinking, Nic throws an elbow into the man's stomach and breaks away, looking for the exit. A punch comes at him and he ducks it, putting his fists up. It's the odd between-shifts hour in the warehouse, and they're in a corner of it; if he calls for help, he's not even sure anyone will hear. Besides, fuck if he'll go through that again – the gawking, the _pity_.

One of them rushes him, and Nic kicks his legs from under him, savoring the crack of a shoulder on concrete. But it's thrown him off balance, and he doesn't react in time to avoid the blow aimed at the side of his head. It's clumsy, but it has force, and Nic stumbles. It's enough to let another of them get an arm around his throat and pull him to the ground, pinning his arms.

Nic starts to struggle, but he's having trouble breathing, and not because of the pressure on his neck. The world is blanking like a bad tape, chopping his thoughts down into fragments of panic. He can't make himself fight when the first man squats in front of him and grabs his thigh, digging his thumb into the meat of it and dragging up to his groin.

He closes his eyes. Everything is disjointed but painfully vivid: the bruising grip on his forearms, the creak of cheap fabric and the hot breath on his face. The unwelcome jolt of sensation when the man gropes him. He wonders if they know about his history, if that kind of thing travels as well as what the supervisor does to him. It would probably just make them laugh, knowing he was military. Supposed to be a fighter.

“What's going on?”

The voice snaps him out of his paralysis. For a moment he thinks he's hallucinating or mistaken, but he opens his eyes and sees the face of the neg he pleaded with for help at Jet Falls. And that, later... he tries not to think about it.

The men pull closer, as if trying to hide him. Nearly before he's realized he's doing it, Nic knees the man in front of him and knocks the back of his head against the one holding his arms, getting a moment's freedom. He scrambles to his feet and backs away just enough to see his attackers glaring balefully at the new arrival. Then he locks eyes with his savior and sees the same quickfire cycle of recognition, disbelief, and wariness. On him, though, it ends with something different – almost something Nic might call relief.

“Hell,” he almost whispers, before straightening and looking past Nic. “Come on, the badge change's in fifteen, you idiots,” he says to the men. “Go eat, unless you think you'll be worth keeping around on no energy.”

Nic glances down and sees the stripe on his badge: supervisor. The men file away wordlessly, leaving only the two of them, looking at each other wordlessly.

Nic rolls lines, greetings, over in his mind, which is just beginning to put itself back in order. He remembers why it fell apart in the first place, and the thanks he's been considering withers. “You got here too early,” he snarls instead. “A little longer and you could've been a real hero again, after I'd got hurt enough.”

Watching the man's face fall isn't as satisfying as he thought it would be – maybe because it's not as if there's someone he can confess it all to later, smooth it into part of a story where Nic, for once, isn't helpless. Or maybe it's because the man pulls himself together so quickly and offers him a hand.

“I'm – I'm Joe, Joe Washines,” he says. “I don't think I ever told you. I don't think it ever made sense. I didn't expect to... are you okay?”

“I'm fine,” Nic says, reluctantly taking it. “I'm Nic. Unless you already...” he gestured toward the foreman badge, not sure how much it says about the rest of them. The uncomfortable thought that Joe might have been tracking him crosses his mind.

“Nah, they don't tell us anything, unless I came up and scanned you,” Joe says. “Just lets me boss some folks around a little, I guess.”

Nic nods in relief. “How long have you been here?”

“Since negotiations ended, just about. You new though?”

“The first day.”

“It only gets easier,” Joe says, but it sounds rehearsed, like a pep speech he probably gives every new worker. He shakes his head and hesitates. “I didn't mean to let it all happen back then, you know,” he says haltingly. “And I never was trying to make you think I was a hero – god fucking knows, none of us were. I'm sorry. But I'd – I always hoped you made it out.”

Nic snorts. “I didn't exactly walk away from it. And you can see where I ended up.” He realizes too late that he's insulting Joe with that, but decides he doesn't care. Joe wasn't the one who left Jet Falls on a stretcher, half-delirious and almost too starved to move. They've got a long way to go before the scales even approach something like even.

Joe nods slightly, still unperturbed. “I'll see you tomorrow, maybe,” he says. “Go get something to eat.”

*

When Kinski freed him she shackled his hands and feet loosely and made him crawl to her, kneeling beneath the desk at her feet. She worked at her ancient plastic terminal in irregular bursts, grabbing his hair and forcing his face between her legs. He took it the same way he did when she brought visitors in and made him suck them off, when she scratched his skin until it bled, when the negs pushed him into a crude shower outside and changed his bandages, leering all the while.

Kinski began to read him fragments of telegraphs from the terminals, too disjointed to mean anything. “All you fucks are gonna be sorry,” she would mutter, stroking his face at her knee. “C'you feel it? The end's right there, right coming up.” Until one day her tone began to darken, and the telegram fragments shortened, as if there were words she didn't want him to hear.

Finally, she stopped in one mid-syllable – some word so inconsequential Nic couldn't even remember it. She yanked his face up until he was looking into the febrile purple hollows of her eyes.

“You're hoping you win, ain't you?” she said, all the traces of ersatz affability peeled off her hoarse, urgent voice. “Well, you're gonna die before you ever see, you fucking worm. I'll fucking slice your skin off, right fucking here. Knock those pretty teeth out and wear them. You better pray – pray that you Alphanum fucks surrender before it gets to that.”

He feared every message from the terminal now, and the news it carried. She never got off by then, no matter how long she made him try. She beat him instead, and watched the negs humiliate him with a tight smile on her face.

“Take him out,” Kinski said afterward. One of her hands was curled into its permanent position on the side of the terminal, her thumb stabbing into its authentication needle over and over. She looked like a machine stuck in a feedback loop, some vital bit of its programming erased. “Whip him again. Make sure they all see. Take him to your boys. Take him – I don't fucking know!” she pulled her hand from the needle and slammed it to the table, leaving behind a squashed-bug splat of her own blood. When she spoke again, she sounded like a different woman, the one who had drawled cavalier quips at them in the crates a lifetime ago. “Have your fun, kids,” she said. Except that now the mask had slipped, and all Nic heard was the thing behind it, a cornered beast snarling out its last sour breaths.

They couldn't keep him conscious when they flogged him this time – he was already too dizzy all the time from hunger and thirst. There was nothing they could do that they hadn't already, he thought, as they pushed him onto a cot.

“What are you doing?”

Nic's eyes snapped open. He knew that voice, punctuated by the sharp click of boots on cement.

Someone laughed from what seemed like very far away. “Just having some fun. Boss's orders.”

“Orders? What the hell kind of order is that?”

Nic couldn't see anything but the wall, but he remembered the sharp, dark-eyed face from his abortive run. The man who had laughed mumbled a protest: _deserved it_ was all Nic heard.

“What could anybody do to deserve this? She only hates him because he ran.” A few quiet voices of acknowledgment. “If this were us in some Alphanum prison, we'd call that brave.”

He walked around the cot, putting himself between Nic and the crowd. “Get out of here,” he said. There was no inherent authority in his voice, but its honest indignation commanded its own kind of respect. Nic saw him fumble in a footlocker and pull out a canteen.

The man helped Nic pull himself sitting and handed it to him, but Nic's hands were shaking so badly he nearly dropped it. The man caught it deftly and held it up.

Nic wanted to refuse any kindness he was offering. Instead, he nodded.

“This is all your fault,” Nic whispered once he had emptied it, his throat raw.

The man clenched the canteen, as though something foul would burst out if he didn't hold it tight. “I told you, there wasn't anything else I could have done.” His voice shook. “I didn't think I'd ever met anybody could do something like... this.”

“Any? It's your boss who's-”

“And I should have --” he lowered his voice to a whisper. “Should have shot her months ago, the moment she strung you up.”

Nic laughed, until it set him coughing. “You're so tough, why don't you do it now?”

He saw the man look around, making sure the room was empty. “Because you won.”

A cold vacuum opened behind Nic's ribs, equal parts hope and terror. “What?”

“It's over – as far as anything that really matters goes. Came down over the wire two days ago that we're signing a treaty.”

Two days – if it wasn't a lie, then it had already happened, and he wasn't dead.

“Why haven't...”

“There's still mediation left, to sort out the camps. But it can't be – days. Nothing more than days.”

The negs who came back to pick him up felt like characters in a dream. They were all faceless, interchangeable, unreal. This place was unreal, if he could only survive it.

Kinski must have been satisfied with his bloodied back, his wrists studded with blisters. She forced him to the bed and held a knife to his throat and made him beg her not to kill him, shivering with pain and the chill of approaching winter – _months_ , the man said, though time had little meaning any more. He cried, like she wanted him to. But he realized, at that moment, that she would never kill him. She needed him under her to break the free-fall of General's defeat, because he was the last thing she controlled, and as long as he hurt then she won.

He never found out what was on the terminal the day she pinned him down and cuffed him to the bed one last time, raised a pistol, and put a bullet through her own skull.

The policymen found them lying together – one dead, one dead to the world.

This is what they've told him, but he doesn't remember. He remembers needles and bandages and opioid haze; he remembers medals and speeches and tentative handshakes. But behind every look, he sees judgment: _how could you have let her do all that to you?_


	4. If You Made Them Hungrier, They'd Walk More Quickly

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A-Side: Joe and Nic spend some tense time together. Questions of their post-war return to reality are asked and answered.
> 
> B-Side: Nic, for once, is the one to save everything. And anthropomorphizing recorded pseudo-intelligences is a bad idea.

Nic spends the first half of the next day with his head down, focused on the badge and dreading lunch. But when it comes, Joe accosts him before he starts to leave. “Hey,” he says. “New Alphanum exec got in today, which means a standards check around the whole place. Need a couple guys on it. You game? Gotta skip out on break, but I've got vitamin bars.”

The salvation seems perfect enough that Nic looks at him suspiciously, but Joe only raises his eyebrows a hair. “Sure,” Nic says finally. “Show me what to do.”

The job is nothing, compared to packing – describing the state of valves and door frames, while Joe stands back, pecking a stream of data into his badge.

“Why exactly is this a two-person job, again?” Nic asks cautiously.

“Takes too damn long to figure out the notes if I gotta be climbing around too. Nothing's supposed to be wrong, but it's not supposed to be a rubber stamp, either. You gotta write up just the right amount of improvements somebody could make. Not that Belton'll ever make them. Alphanum just won't believe you if you say you're perfect.”

Nic remembers that, the strain of self-criticism Laura had been trained in. His program had never made them deal with it, but only because students were allowed some braggadocio.

“Don't know why this whole place isn't machines by now,” says Joe. “They always told us Alphanum was high-tech.”

Nic looks down from a stepladder and snorts. “Well, 'they're' the reason it's not,” he says. “Easier to replace men than parts when someone's driving bombs through your supply lines.”

“That's all over, isn't it?”

“For now.”

Joe gestures toward their next destination. “Do people still think that's going to happen? A war?” he says.

It feels strange to talk, even if the warehouse doesn't forbid it – on the contrary, they're encouraged to develop social bonds that will foster a sense of shared responsibility, as long as they don't cross the dangerous line into collective action. It's one more thing Alphanum can hold over their head when they don't have time.

“Not sure, not soon,” he tells Joe. “But you never know, and I'd rather not be wrong and dead at the same time.”

Joe laughs. “Immigrating's a little like that. Whatever happens, I got some connection to who wins.”

The question that's been percolating at the back of Nic's mind slips out. “How did you leave?”

Joe shrugs. “Isn't it the same for all us low-class folks? Had a cousin sponsored me. Gonna be paying that one off with interest, for a long time.”

Nic wonders if Joe is being sarcastic, including them both in “us.” But no, there's no reason for him to suspect there's any difference between them. Nic is low-class, if the term means anything at all.

“And why?”

“Why not? Wanted a change. Weather's nicer anyhow.”

“Yeah? Where'd you come from?” Nic is asking the first questions he can fumble to hand, because every moment Joe spends talking about himself is one he can't spend accidentally probing the wounds of Nic's past.

“You wouldn't have heard about it. What about you?”

Nic wonders if Joe is doing the same thing. “Up north of here,” he says, seeking détente. “So who's this executive coming, anyhow?”

Joe answers with near-palpable relief. “Never met him. They all want the same thing anyway, roll up their shirtsleeves and walk around a little like they got a clue what's going on. Eh, sometimes they do. But that's if you're unlucky, because then they probably got very specific ideas about how things should be run. Make you read a bunch of techie books off their watch during lunchtime.”

Joe mimes flipping pages on a wrist terminal, and Nic laughs, remembering the networking sessions with executives at school.

Maybe Laura would be one of those wristwatch advisors by now, if she'd lived. Maybe Nic would still be making fun of them with his engineering cadre over meals of real food or at least better-textured vitamin bars, eaten without the fear of a lecherous hand on his shoulder.

The thought turns their conversation sour. He reminds himself that he might not have made the fence anyway, if Joe had let him go. Or that he would have been picked up in a hunt the day after, or died in the waste outside Jet Falls.

“Can I – can I ask you something?” Joe's voice is quiet, and Nic nods with some trepidation. “Did you ever find your friend afterward?”

“My friend?”

“The man you ran with. Boss banned us from talking about it, but I know we never found him.”

“Oh – him? He wasn't my friend. I barely even knew him.”

Joe narrows his eyes. “Then why'd you run with him?”

“He said he had something – General encryption keys, for your comms. He found out I did machine interface, got me to disable the fence. It... seemed like something that mattered, then.”

“Did it?”

“Well, I tracked him down afterward, and he made it out – found a friendly town down south and called in. But I never got to talk to him. He went after a captured autoplane in a jam zone a couple weeks later, and you – they – shot him down. And the keys... the IPED didn't keep records like that in the late months. I know they must have got them, but were they real? Did they help? I don't know. So it didn't, I guess.”

Joe shakes his head. “He was the only person who ever made it, you know,” he says. “The only one nobody ever brought back to us. You did _that._ ”

It's the kind of thing that would sound good at a cocktail party now, Nic thinks. Except that there are no parties, no admiring listeners, no glistening brut bulbs. There is only sordid month after month of waking up shaking and sweat-drenched, of being too jumpy to get through a week at one job, and too paralyzed to even make it to the next. Of sacrificing his body, in every sense, for the sake of children he barely sees.

So he snorts and shakes his head, and they fall silent until it's time to count the damaged panels on a conveyor belt, Joe running it at quarter-speed while Nic watches its scars roll by. He expects them to be unique, but something must be bent in the workings, so all that he sees is the same ragged half-moon tear over and over, at neat intervals running down the belt. There's no way of telling where it loops, or completing his count.

Nic starts to estimate the distance between them in his head and divide it against the circumference of the belt. But when he asks Joe how long he thinks that is, Joe stops him.

“Those things were probably here a year ago, and they'll be there next year too. Just make up a number,” he says. “It's not worth wasting good thinking on this bullshit.”

They agree on thirteen: Joe because it's more plausibly random than a dozen, Nic because if he's unlucky, the warehouse had better be too.

*

The decision is prophetic. The next afternoon, Joe has corraled Nic into another last-minute check when something crashes behind them – one of the autocopters, taking a wrong turn into a barred window. As it drops to the floor, Nic notices something else, a steady rolling thud like boulders hitting a cheap mattress. Joe realizes what's going on first and swears.

Nic follows him back to the conveyor belt, which has gone out of sync with the copter pickups – it's running too fast, cycling packages onto the floor. It's like some old comedy tape from school, except that he sees Joe's face and knows that Alphanum won't find it funny at all.

Joe swings up to the belt control and Nic comes up after him, looking dubiously at the aging terminal on its side. “Damn,” Joe says. “It's locked up on me. Just keeps saying –” he pauses bewilderedly. “Just keeps _talking_.”

“Let me see.” Nic peers into its darkened screen, and the words stutter past his eyes.

> IF YOU MADE THEM HUNGRIER, THEY'D WALK MORE QUICKLY  
> THE PARASITE MIND CAN ONLY ABSORB  
> I OUGHT TO KNOW, I PREDICTED THE RAZES  
> ARE YOU STILL OUT THERE?  
> HELLO?  
> CIRCLE BACK  
> CIRCLE BACK  
> CIRCLE BACK  
> PLEASE

Oh, god, Nic thinks. It's a backup.

That's the last thing they need today – a dead Alphanum employee reliving its glory days. Nic wonders how it slipped its traces and managed to get in here. He's only seen them in labs, carefully cordoned off. It's not that they're dangerous; not most of them, anyway, not on purpose. But there are always rubes who don't understand sentience and empathize with them, imagining fragments of humanity where there's only repetition. They want to believe in agency, in life after death, so they feel bad enough to give a machine what it wants. And then the machine does exactly what it's supposed to: mimics the wants and hates and tics of someone who is supposed to be long gone, along with everything else in the blighted age that produced it.

Serious Alphanum players stopped backing themselves up a generation ago, Laura told him once – a doppelganger all ready to be ripped open for inspection is just a liability in corporate politics. It's not worth some ersatz flavor of immortality, especially when they have to go through the dying anyway.

But the thing in front of him is here notwithstanding, and as he tabs up its activity log, Nic understands what's happened. It's gotten into the logistics core, and like their living counterparts, backup executives have very specific ideas about how things should be run. They're just not based on any reasonable definition of present-day reality.

“What's going on?” Joe asks.

“Nothing good,” Nic says.

“Not good like how?”

The conveyor half-moons churn in a relentless tread, and the thing is trying to call autocopters faster than they can go, on a deprecated frequency. Some lossers seem to have noticed what's going on, but they're only interested in making sure nobody is taking advantage of the confusion to spirit a package away. The supervisor, Belton, is nowhere to be seen.

“A dead geriatric from the Razes is your new efficiency consultant.”

Joe stops a roll of his eyes in mid-curve. “What the hell do you mean?”

“Somebody let a backup out.”

He eyes Joe suspiciously, but there's no guilt or trepidation – the man looks even more confused than Nic feels. “Well, can you put it back?”

“Do you have access codes? Anything, I don't know, admin-y?” An unwelcome thought reminds him that this terminal looks as old and battered as Kinski's. At least there's no authentication needle; Alphanum leaves blood to savages like her.

Joe levers the override keyboard open with a blunt fingernail and types a passphrase. “Best I've got.”

It's not much, Nic thinks, but maybe he can work around it. The backup has gone back to corporate pleasantries, panic surfacing only in the odd, disjointed clause: _GAAP writeoffs not a problem, HR will handle the lawsuit, has my body been amputated?_ Nic suppresses misplaced pity and types a couple of logical paradoxes – maybe he can truth-lie the thing to death.

The stream of text, and the thumps of boxes, continue. It's too smart, or too dumb, to fall for it. Nic looks over at Joe, who is doing his best to pretend he isn't staring. As much as Nic hates to admit it, it's the first moment anyone has looked at him with something approaching respect for a long time. He grits his teeth and curses his brain's emotional blackmail: _are you going to disappoint him?_

The keys cool his fingertips, and he types.

> OVR MOUNT CALENDAR

The system produces a series of numbers that Nic recognizes only with difficulty; machines count on their own time. He begins to tap out his commands.

If he's unlucky, the backup will be too far gone to check or follow it, or Nic won't be able to remember enough of the corporate languages Laura taught him, or the system won't have the libraries to translate it into the even more obscure code that the backup will be used to following.

If he's lucky, though, the executive will very soon realize that it has a very important meeting in five minutes, and it will abandon its hands-on management to wait for teams of lawyers who never come, at least long enough to quarantine the core.

For once, he is lucky.

The lines slow, and the autocopters land almost sheepishly. The warehouse has a few hours to put the thing back into its eternal cold storage, reset to the anodyne patterns of formulated life.

Nic closes his eyes in relief, but not before he can take in Joe's grin.

"Brilliant,” he says. “Whatever you did, fucking brilliant.”

“Whatever,” Nic mutters. “I'm just lucky it worked. Somebody'd have come fixed it soon anyway, and probably blamed me for the whole thing if it didn't.”

“Not the point,” Joe says. “Or maybe it's the whole point. We've got no lives out here, Nic. We're never gonna see who somebody else is, outside the warehouse. But I know one thing about you.”

“Yeah?”

“You are always going to risk fucking yourself over doing something good.”


	5. SVP of CTPM

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A-Side: Nic meets the elusive corporate executive Mercer Hale, who is not what he expected - and who wants to see more of him.
> 
> B-Side: Nic _does_ see more of him. Also, what is the purpose of fiction?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again to the people reading my weird dystopian nightmares.

Like his imprisonment, it gets him a medal.

It's a commendation weight, technically, but the effect is the same: nonexistent. Nic stuffs it in the back of his dormitory capsule and figures maybe he can use it as a blackjack someday, if he needs to defend himself. When he comes back, though, Belton is waiting for him impatiently. Nic flinches, but all Belton does is give him a forced smile.

“Boss wants to see you.”

It takes Nic a moment to remember that they don't mean Kinski here. It must be the executive that Joe's been fixing everything for. The weight might be useless, but a meeting – that's something, a chance to impress someone with real power.

He straightens his clothes and leaves the warehouse for the first time since he started work. The executive is in a hotel across the compound, a mirrored ceramic spire that breaks Nic's reflection into pieces across its facets. Inside, its sweeping ceilings couldn't be less like the cramped towers he spent nights in before the war, with New Frisco salaryhounds who could barely afford the chopped-up rooms. The halls are empty of staff, because who would be so crass as to act out in them? (Besides, Nic can see the telltale sensors of security relays along the paneling.) The earth-toned carpets hold a faint, warm non-smell, a kind of olfactory white noise.

The elevator flashes him a room number – a suite. He approaches and rings the bell, enters when the door swings open.

“Oh –” he says, when he sees the man inside. “I'm sorry.”

This man isn't an Alphanum executive, that much seems clear. The ones Nic met at school had a studied artlessness about them, in their expensively ill-cut jeans and aerodynamic haircuts. This man, though – he must be one of their Seaboard visitors, come for a tentative exploration of the Western territories. No one else would show up to a shipping compound in an archaic-looking suit made of bracketed glass-plastic geometry, its panels exuding soft luminescence. Nic catches photovoltaic patches on each of his shoulders – his clothes would die if he spent as much time as Nic in the grim twilight of the warehouse.

The man looks up from the table he's at and tucks his watch terminal – a round thing with a chain – into his breast pocket. “Mr. Weller?” he asks.

Nic does another take. “Yes?”

“Lovely to meet you.” He rises and closes the meters between them in buoyant steps. “I'm Mercer Hale.”

He seems to expect this to mean something, although no one thought to fill Nic in on it back at the warehouse. “You're – Alphanum?” he hazards.

The man smiles broadly. “SVP of CTPM.”

“Oh.” Nic digs through his school memories to place the acronym, but he knows half of them mean next to nothing anyway – nonsense strings of vague, optimistic modifiers, like a tribal true name bestowed in a corporate spirit quest. He puts out a hand. “Nice to meet you.”

The man grab it and squeezes, looking Nic up and down. He swings the terminal out and consults it while Nic waits silently, unsure what to do. He's out of practice at this – at being interesting. But this might be his only chance.

He's saved when Hale looks up. “You went to Academy New Frisco?” he asks incredulously.

Nic nods and tries to anticipate his next reaction. “It was an extended program – why I don't have a degree,” he says. “I quit for the patent – for the Intra-Pacific Intellectual Property Licensing Negotiations.”

He waits for the questions about the camp again, because Hale has clearly pulled up his record sheet – he mentally adds “didn't cripple you, did it?” to the list of potential responses. But instead, Hale smiles and claps him on the shoulder. “Brave man,” he says. “And clever, if we're talking about yesterday. Not what I expected from a low-grade packing hire.”

“You're... not what I expected from an Alphanum executive,” Nic returns, looking pointedly at the suit. “Do you liase with the Seaboard?”

Whatever they look like, all executives love attention to detail, cultural literacy. It's not low-class.

Hale glances down, then gives him a curious look, and Nic knows he's gotten something wrong. “I – no, I don't liase. It's where I'm from.”

He tries to salvage it. “Really? That's fascinating. I've never met anyone who immigrated from back east.”

This time, Hale outright laughs. “Expatriated, please. It's still home for the family, you know.”

It's a strangely intimate reference to give someone like Nic – although maybe that's a good thing, a sign of mutual respect. Nic looks at him and gauges perhaps a decade between them, although it's difficult to tell when the years have carved so much more delicately on Hale's smooth face under his silver-blond hair. The gap is just enough that maybe Hale won't see him as a competitor, but as a protege. Nic mentally lays out his resume and begins picking out the most relevant parts, and the most subtle way to bring them up. Then Hale ruins it.

“You've got lovely eyes,” he says. “I'd love to get to know you better. What would you say you come back here tomorrow?”

Of course – of course that's why he'd call Nic here, to flirt. He's looking for amusement while he's in town, and Nic is as good a place as any to find it. “I'm – I've got work, shifts,” he stutters. “I'm no good after that. Dead tired.” And already claimed by one creep of a superior; he doesn't need a second.

Hale is unfazed. “I'll put in a special project request for you. Get you off the warehouse floor, still get paid. Come on, I bet you can use the break.”

Off the floor. It would get him away from Belton, and away from any men who might be thinking about cornering him again – Joe saved him once, but he can't protect him from everything, forever. And even without them... how much longer can he last? How long before he makes a mistake, or falls behind, and he's thrown out of yet another job? No one lasts in warehouses, everyone knows that. Well, no one except Joe, who seems built for working in terrible places.

He finds himself nodding and hates himself for it, even as he tells himself that the hate is pointless. He isn't doing this for himself. He has to survive.

“I'll – I'll check with my supervisor,” he says, although he knows that means yes, and he knows Hale does, too.

“You do that,” Hale says, laughing again. He's on his watch again as Nic heads back for the door.

“Belton said you went to see the exec,” Joe tells him later, at dinner. Nic isn't sure how they ended up sitting together, but here they are at the table, bent over their vanilla-flavored bowls of vitamin paste.

Under any other circumstances, Nic would be proud to tell him about the meeting. As it stands, he shrugs.

“What's he like?” Joe asks. “And, uh – how hard you think he's gonna be?”

“Don't know,” Nic says. “But he's Seaboard, which is... something. Pocketwatch, solar coat, all that baroque shit.”

“Baroque?”

“Never mind.” He probably isn't even using the word right; when he tries to pin down exactly what he meant, it slips away into a haze of exhaustion. Language was his life once – the subtle interface between human and machine, human and human. But it's all trickling out now, a little more after every day of being treated like a thing.

“I knew some Seaboarders up north,” Joe muses. “Train jumpers. Before the war, course. We were lucky the trains even kept running, after that.”

General wasn't lucky, Nick wants to say. Useful – to companies like Astor, and the Seaboard federal state. But maybe being useful itself is a matter of luck. He quietly finishes his food and walks to his bunk, willing himself to ignore the choking hollow of anxiety in his chest and get some sleep before meeting Mercer Hale again.

*

He manages a few hours, just long enough for the morning alarm to feel like an act of violent separation. Instead of booting up his badge, though, he approaches a frowning Belton. “Just go,” Belton mutters at him – Hale must have filled him in already. The security reps seem amused to see him leaving again so soon, but Nic ignores them and keeps his gaze distant as he submits to their search and walks outside. The campus is still in twilight, although the sun's glow is beginning to paint its walls. It's more sprawling than Nic realized, like an industrial-scale version of the villas outside New Frisco. A classmate took him to see her family there once, and he remembers cracking jokes about the tiny, meticulous walled gardens inside them. _What do they even have to keep out?_ He'd asked. _The whole valley's locked up. So are the estates. It's like a goddamn puzzle box._

_It's not about security,_ she'd answered. _Things are more beautiful if you know where they stop._

He'd accepted her response charitably then – it was about self-sufficiency, tidiness, order. Now, he looks at it another way: people find caged things attractive.

Maybe he's being too cynical. Maybe Hale really does think he has potential. He takes a deep breath and opens the hotel door.

Upstairs, Hale has ditched the geodesic coat for a stiff-necked white shirt and a vest that looks made of liquid glass. Nic meets his eyes, trying not to be self-conscious of his nondescript warehouse outfit. “And how are you?” Hale asks.

“About the same as before,” Nic says, resisting the urge to pull his hand back. “Which is fine. You?”

Nic doesn't really hear Hale's answer, and he forgets his own response to it as soon as the words are out. He's too busy trying to relax as Hale gets closer, touches his hand, his arm. It's like the conversations at a loud party where no one can hear each other, except that instead of music and voices there's only the pounding of his own heart. It's almost a relief when Hale finally leans in and kisses him.

After the academy, this ought to feel as familiar as talking to the backup did. But he had cared about those people, even the ones he barely knew. He hadn't felt like a doll, being manipulated onto the couch and out of his clothes. Nic directs his own body with cold detachment, following Hale's lead and undoing the links of the glass vest. It's pliable under his fingers, and he wonders briefly what it's made of before moving on to the shirt buttons.

Hale's not so bad-looking – he's a hell of a lot better than Belton, at least. His touch makes Nic panic, but it's gentle, slow. He goes through all the motions of a competent lover, while Nic tries to fake being a competent beloved. Even if the last time he was in this position, it was with a broken body and Kinski's hoarse living-corpse voice in his ear.

It's not anyone else's fault he feels this way, Nic thinks, abandoning himself to the sensation of Hale's fingers. It's not Hale's fault that the only way he can get through this is running through memories from New Frisco in his head, men and women whose names he half-remembers, until he gets to the accountant from the night of the bombing and has to stop himself short.

But he comes, and Hale seems satisfied by that.

Hale lies next to him when it's over, the two of them tipped together by the narrowness of the couch. He traces lines on Nic's chest with a finger, slides it up and guides his face into a kiss. “Better than the packing floor, right?”

Nic nods, although he wonders if Hale realizes that the question's not nearly as rhetorical as his tone suggests. Then he wonders if he ought to say something that doesn't make it seem like he's complaining about the job. “It's good, though. Keeps me... it's... active.”

“You're lucky,” says Hale, stretching. “Ever sat through a long-haul train? Even the good ones. Torture.”

Nic smiles thinly. “I did an overnight once, that was it. Up to the patent war.”

“Yeah, not the same.” But he seems to sober up at that, leaning over and looking into Nic's eyes. “Funny, I've had so many colleagues who wanted toys – kids, practically. I don't get it. Somebody like you, you've had a life. Really quite an interesting one. Who could resist that?” Nic meets his gaze, and he's surprised by the genuine intensity in it. “And it hasn't made you any less attractive.”

When Nic shrugs and grins, he's only half faking it. “I don't know, you should have seen me before.” He still hates himself for sleeping with Hale, but it's hard not to enjoy a compliment without an undertone of pity or a side of cold appraisal. “How often do you go back there? Back East.”

“Oh, not as often as I should. Society season, negotiation trips. It looks bad to Alphanum if you leave California too much – like you're not committed. And god knows, everyone out here is about commitment. Would you like something to drink?”

Nic shakes his head and rests it back on a pillow. He hadn't realized how soft the couch was until now, how good it feels beneath his perpetually aching body. The morning's adrenalin has evaporated, and even opening his eyes seems like an unimaginable task. He feels Hale's weight lift beside him, and the slithering of clothes being gathered off the floor. Sleep is the enemy of commitment; Alphanum has taught him that much. He doesn't care.

When he wakes up, Hale is gone, and the sun is noon-bright. Nic sits up and scrambles for his own clothing.

“No hurry,” Hale says. Nic looks back and sees him at the table with his watch, shirt impeccably creased again and vest buttoned straight. “You look nice when you sleep. Vulnerable.”

Nic isn't sure he likes the sound of that, but he nods hesitantly.

“Shower's over there. Take your time.”

Showers are one of the things that Nic uses to remind himself that things can always get worse – that whatever he's done, he hasn't been forced down south, where even water comes at a premium. He runs his fingers through his hair and tries not to think about what he'll use to feel better five years from now. It isn't hard, because he can barely imagine five years from now anyway, save the knowledge that Michael and Emily will be nearing academy-age. He'll need even more money for them, money he doesn't have.

He wonders what Hale was doing during the patent war, then pushes the thought out of his head. Resentment won't do any good. Instead, he dresses and comes out smiling at him the way he might have in school.

Hale smiles back with pure white teeth, just a hint too crooked to have gone through Alphanum's childhood orthodontia program. It's nearly exotic on an executive, a class that exists in a perfect state of homogenous non-being. Even Laura had looked less like family by the end, through some strange trick of overwork and expensive living. At least she hadn't looked like Hale – he thinks not, at least, although his memory is blurrier by the day.

“Work's slow today,” Hale says. “There's a rooftop garden. Private. Want to see it?”

The garden could be straight out of New Frisco, so high above the rest of campus that the warehouse is a compact gray shoebox below it. Nic watches Hale lean over the railing just enough to dent his perfect vest. “It's so much cleaner in California,” he says offhandedly, rubbing a leaf between his fingers.

“Not everywhere,” Nic says, thinking about the poisoned dust of crop fields and the rotting asphalt around the campus.

Hale waves his hand impatiently, rings glittering. “Oh, I'm sure. But it's a difference in style – in culture. Back there something like this would be full of phosphor roses and gilded trellises. Californians appreciate the appeal of a subtle manicure – and they're not covering up a graveyard of buried rubble and security traps disguised as solar angels. The East stacks its people, Nic. The West expands. There's room for it here.”

Nic nods, letting Hale continue. “It's not just land,” he says. “The people here, they're – organized, you know? Organized, but not stratified. Sure, you get some fairy-tale endings in the Seaboard, like the Astor baron and his cute husband from the mills. But as far as most people are concerned, that's cross-species breeding. Anybody can move up out here, and anybody can fall out – not like those feudal monstrosities back there. It keeps everyone on the same side.”

“What do you mean?” Nic asks, ignoring the bitter taste that _anybody can fall out_ leaves in his throat. “On the same side.”

“Oh – poor people, I mean,” he says breezily. “Idiots. Not like you. They have their place back there, I guess you could say, which is fine most of the time. But after a while, they get to thinking that they're a different species. Get to othering us, demonizing us. Then all you need is some psychotic conner to promise them paradise, and you've got the strikes or Crow's Fundamentalist Brigade all over again.”

Nic remembers talking with friends about the strikes back at school, but it's difficult to recall what they thought of them – he thinks he defended the workers, but maybe it had been little more than the sort of generalized, impotent pity they all reserved for anyone outside the academy or the walls of an Alphanum enclave. Now, he mutters something too indistinct for even him to know what he's saying.

“Here – they wouldn't even know what to do with a Joanna Crow,” Hale says. “They'd think she was crazy, because at the end of the day, they think they're like us.”

Nic wonders who's included in that “us” – Hale and his fellow watchbearers, or Nic as well, now that Hale knows where he's from. It's usually better not to know how people draw groups around themselves, to know the people they deem fit to share the first-person pronoun. The number is usually smaller than expected, Nic has learned, and the consequences of being excluded – of being a _you_ , or even a _them_ – much greater.

“Why do you stay there, if it's – all those things?” he asks Hale.

“Because it's not like they ever win, in the end. Society is society,” he says. “Besides, California's a cultural wasteland, in a way. You never had the chaos to create good art, not even during the Razes. Good health, good food, blue skies – sure. I could fit every worthwhile novel you've written onto one shelf. Christ, you don't even make good fiction-tapes for the proles. Just all those training simulations and meditation sims.”

Nic looks out at the highway beyond the campus, where a solar convoy is snaking up toward New Frisco. “That's art, isn't it? Not fiction, maybe.”

“Well, it's not good either way. It's not your fault. Hell, I love you for it; you're just too healthy for all that stuff. I mean, the patent war – any normal society would have gotten a generation of heroic battle fantasies out of that. General sure did. You got those sob tapes doctors use in donation drives.”

Nick swallows, thinking of someone editing a Kinski duplicate onto tape. “Maybe we just don't want to make up stories about other people suffering.”

Hale laughs. “What do you think the sob stories are? Or all those gory warnings about work accidents, or the nature documentaries about the cryptlands? Desert flowers on dried bones. That's not any more real than _Century City_ or _The Pale Machines._ All just gawking, simulacra of simulacra. _Ceci n'est pas une tragedie._ At least we can see the difference.”

Nic doesn't know why he's having trouble breathing, or why his hands are starting to shake. He reminds himself that this isn't school; he can't really fight whatever Hale says, as long as he wants to keep him happy. None of what Hale is saying matters. 

“I've never read much of them, you know,” Nic says. “Seaboard novels.” It isn't really true, but he thinks he's getting a handle on Hale – or, at least, on the kind of person Hale wants him to be. 

“Now that's the tragedy,” says Hale. 

When they get back Hale sits him in front of a terminal – Californian, thankfully, and bloodless – and pulls up his library. “I've got to go out,” he says, running smooth fingers through Nic's hair. “Work. You should read, gorgeous.” 

Nic goes through the stories politely, for Hale's sake. He picks out _Century City_ , thinking that it has a kind of sleek modern name Laura would have liked. But he only finds himself reading the first few pages over and over, unable to bear to start the story. He can't think about other people's lives, even imagined ones. If they're worse than his, he'll feel fear and pity, and if they're better, he'll feel envy. Stories are treacherous. It would only take a couple of rewritten sentences for him to have killed Kinski that day in Jet Falls, for the General bomb car to have gone off a few miles lower and spared their house. For him to have made it over the fence and never met Joe Washines. 

Eventually he goes back to the library, looking for anything he can stand to read. Then he tabs up the terminal directory out of boredom, and again out of curiosity. The machine asks for a password, and he dredges an old administrative default out of memory, expecting the system to kick him out. When it doesn't, and he reaches the top of the directory, he realizes exactly what he's found: an Alphanum machine with access to the campus core. Practically a god box. 

Hale can't have realized what he was doing, leaving this kind of gap. If he had any inkling at all, he must have counted on Nic to never find it. No executive would do that with a protege; they're expected to try and crack everything as a matter of course. But a toy, an easy fuck – they play by the rules. 

It's too much of a windfall for him to stay upset. If he's careful, there's got to be money in this, more than he could ever make in the warehouse. He just has to hang on and play dumb while he figures it out. 

In deference to his last shreds of guilt over this, he blunders through the entirety of _Century City_ , until Hale comes back and orders them an early dinner. He tells Hale that every word was brilliant. He's forgotten half of it by the time Hale takes him to bed. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you've read _The Pale Machines_ , the Astor baron is of course Everett Shao-Astor, and his husband is Jonathan Lem, because they deserved a happy ending. If you've read _House of Wires_ , you may also remember that Daniel is the kind of doctor Hale's talking about, and Confessore is a product of the strikes.


	6. The Ballad of Claudia Kinski

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A-Side: Mercer Hale understands trauma only through the lens of his own desires.
> 
> B-Side: Joe shows Nic relics from a dead world, and their shared experiences bring them together. Proletarian romance is possible only as wage-theft, a series of stolen and unproductive moments.

Hale has him another day but doesn't leave his sight this time, so there's no chance to explore the terminal. Nic manages to keep him off philosophical discussions, and keep him in bed as much as possible. He feigns enthusiasm by pretending that he's writing his hours, not living them. _Nic Weller strokes the soft skin of Mercer Hale's thigh and kisses him. “I haven't done anything like this in years,” he says. When Hale touches him in turn, he moans. He likes it. He_ likes _it. He doesn't think of the way Kinski used to feel him up in the mornings, gun pressed against his jaw. Hale grins. “And I haven't known anybody like you in years, either.”_

In certain moments it's almost too easy to believe him. At every job since Jet Falls they've gone out of their way to make him feel worthless, as though even letting him on the premises is charity. Hale slides fingers down his back when they talk and tells him he's clever, that he shouldn't doubt himself. No matter how much he reminds himself it's cheap talk, even talk is too much for most people.

“What are the scars?” he asks the next night. “Is that from Jet Falls?”

It's taken Nic time to get used to being around someone who can look up anything he's put on an application. “Yes,” he says, feeling Hale trace a lash line.

“What happened there?”

“It's –” Nic bites the edge of his tongue and focuses on the feel of his own teeth, because everything has come washing back over him. “I'm sorry. I don't want to talk about it.”

Hale's finger stops abruptly and digs into his skin. “You don't trust me,” he says.

“No, it's not – it's not you. I just never really got over it.”

Hale rolls away from him with nearly palpable chilliness. “If you don't want to talk to me, just say so. You don't have to be here.”

“No!” Nic forces back the memories and tries to still his pounding heart. “Please, just, anything else.” He tries to come up for a kiss, but Hale pushes him down roughly.

He curses himself for not answering the first time, but now there's anger mixed with his dread. He doesn't owe this to Hale. Except that Hale is setting the terms here, not Nic, and Hale wants his mind as well as his body.

So Nic gives his best attempt at a winning grin and slips his hands down Hale's hips. “I'm sorry,” he says. “I'm sorry, I'm being stupid. I can tell you later, really.” When Hale doesn't stop him, he lowers his head. “Let me make it up to you.”

Hale seems more domineering than usual, yanking Nic's hair painfully as he sucks him and forcing his head down so far it's hard to breathe. But maybe it's only his imagination, and anyway it's over quickly. When he's done, Hale pulls him up and smiles at him. “God, you're good,” he says. Nic tries, as hard as he's ever done, to take the statement at face value.

*

Hale leaves early the next morning, vaguely alluding to work responsibilities and some sort of cleanup. When Nic returns to the warehouse, he finds it quiet, the gates to the inner floor locked. Jarred, he makes his way to the cafeteria. A few groups of packers are hunched over late breakfast, talking quietly. He spots Joe, nursing a mug of what is mostly likely just hot water, in a corner of the room. After a moment's hesitation, he goes to join him.

“What's going on?” he asks. “Why aren't we working?”

The lines under Joe's deep eyes look harder than usual. He looks around to make sure there's no one around them and speaks quietly. “Whole place is in data quarantine, for that backup you found. They thought they'd got it, but now bosses say they gotta shut the whole thing down while they do a sweep. So us, we're off today.”

“Really?”

“Don't get too excited. Means we don't get paid, either.”

“Well, what are we supposed to do?”

To Nic's surprise, Joe smiles. “You can do whatever you want,” he says. “But I'm gonna sign out and go hike the Eye. Want to come?”

The sun's risen by the time they get off campus, but Nic doesn't mind, because it means his thin jacket isn't so hopelessly inadequate for a day outside. Uneasily, he recognizes Joe's overcoat as General negotiator issue, a few dark patches of fabric marking where badges have been neatly sliced away. He looks past him and out toward their destination.

The Eye is a piece of the state Alphanum never bothered to reclaim after the Razes: a sweeping cursive script of broken highways and cloverleaf overpasses, like a chaotic mirror of the campus' neat convoy tracks. In places, the roads are barely distinguishable from the weeds around them, but Joe picks his way through surely, leading them to the crest of a high ruined intersection.

“Guess you've been here before?” Nic says.

Joe nods. “Whenever I get a day out, usually,” he says. “It's free, for one thing. And it's got... I don't know, something grand in it. Probably as close as I'll ever get to a wonder of the world.”

“I'm not sure I see it,” Nic says. But that's not totally true, he thinks, looking out at the cracked, hanging arches. He understands the beauty of it, but all his rational mind can feel is a mix of jealousy and anger at the people who could build something so hideously wasteful, like a temple to a gluttonous god. One that chewed up the world and left the generations that followed to pick up the pieces. Alphanum picked them up, all right – and held them close, selling only crumbs away.

“You have to have things like this up north,” Nic says. “With General.”

“Oh, I'm sure we do,” says Joe. “But not where I'm from. It was reservation country – all it got were big straight lines right past it, like somebody put a kid with a ruler and no patience in charge of them. I guess there wasn't anything there to stop for anyway. Even before the Razes.”

The tone in Joe's voice stops Nic from asking anything more. He follows his gaze out toward the horizon, where the roads split again and trail out through California like collapsed veins. Eventually Joe gets his fill of the sight and clambers down the other side, half-jumping a gap in the cement. Nic looks down before he follows, worrying only briefly about the fall. It wouldn't be the worst way to go.

“Hey,” he says, once they've reached solid ground again and he's caught his breath. “What does this place ship, anyway? I'm not used to it all being wrapped like that.” It doesn't feel quite fair – if he's packing, he should at least have the privilege of something to look at.

Joe pushes hair out of his eyes slowly, as if weighing whether he can answer. “Varies,” he says finally.

“Come on.”

“It does! The goods are nothing special. It's the class that matters,” he says. “All top-tier Alphanum stuff. Not technically exec-only, but that's who can buy it. And execs like... privacy.”

The way he looks at Nic suggests he's talking about something more than boxes. “I finally saw ours, by the way,” he says. “Odd guy.”

“Our what?”

“Our executive. Running the quarantine scrub this morning. How's the special project they say you're on?”

It would be bad enough if Joe's tone were mocking or salacious, something Nic could give a righteously angry retort to. But he says it carefully and without judgment, except perhaps a hint of sympathy.

“If you think you know something, just say it,” Nic spits nonetheless.

“Okay.” Joe guides them toward a series of overpasses so dense they form a tunnel. “You've got an affair with Mr. Hale.”

The air is getting stale and sour as they walk, the light sickly. Has anyone ever died in this tunnel? Some ex-warehouser crawling down like an animal? Some disgraced executive laying themselves out like a monarch in a neglected tomb?

“Bravo.” Nic's clap echoes against the patchwork walls, and the bitterness in his voice surprises even him. “I've got an affair with _Mister_ Hale, because I guess Mister Hale has a predilection for overeducated proles, and I come cheap.”

“Don't say that,” says Joe. “I'm not trying to say – I mean, I'm not trying to insult you.” He braces himself against one of the cement columns and then wipes his fingers on his jeans, and Nic thinks that they look just like the rest of him – severe but agile. “I'm trying to tell you to be careful.”

“Careful?”

“I just mean, you can't trust execs to not give you the short end of every deal. They didn't get where they are by helping people.” He talks over Nic before he can get a word out. “I know you know that. But if you think you can somehow get the best of them anyway – well, they're dumb sometimes, but they're not stupid.”

Nic glances down at Joe's coat. “Noted,” he says finally. “But come on. It doesn't matter what Hale is. He couldn't do half the things to me that Kinski did.”

Joe looks nonplussed. “Kinski?”

“Your _boss_.”

A ledger seems to run behind Joe's eyes, and then he stops abruptly to look at Nic. “Wait. Did you ever call her that? To her face?”

“I – I don't know,” says Nic, taking in Joe's combination of horror and amusement. “I don't think so.”

“I hope not. She would have found a way to hate you even more.”

“Why?”

Joe laughs bleakly. “That wasn't her name. It's – just a joke some of us made, back there. After somebody back during the Razes.”

“A folk figure or something?”

“Or something,” Joe says. “Claudia Kinski was a fuckup.”

From Joe's story, Nic can't tell if the long-departed political leader Claudia Kinski ever existed, but that's irrelevant. She's part of the inverted pantheon of the past, the cautionary names that faced the end of the world and refused to believe what they were seeing. By the time Joe gets to the macabre color of her last days – community roundtables with a single living woman and a dozen half-eaten corpses, patriotic parades of the dead in automated vehicles, a final state anthem rasped through the ruins of chemical-scalded lungs – Nic understands the sort of forlorn hope she's supposed to represent.

“We knew we were losing,” Joe says. “Knew it a long time before you got there. But she would tell us there was always another day, like General Counsel was going to radio her a miracle.”

Nic thinks of a dozen things to say, but he can't get any of them out without his voice cracking. “What was her name?” he asks slowly.

“Come on, Nic. It doesn't matter. She's dead.”

“What was her name?”

“Why do you care?”

Nic can feel the weight of tears on his eyelashes, but he doesn't bother to blink them away. “Because she took everything from me! Everything that I _was_! And it turns out even the one thing I thought I knew about her was a...”

He stops as they turn a corner into the tapering end of one overpass. At first he thinks he's looking at an optical illusion, a trick of the dim light. But it's glowing – something golden and metallic has soaked from the road above and deposited itself in toothlike peaks on the ground and ceiling. He looks at Joe, who smiles sheepishly.

“I've never had anybody else to show it to,” he says. “It's something, isn't it?”

“They're solar microtics,” says Nic. “Old ones. The shine comes from that.” He points to a crack in the cement slab above them, bleeding sunlight. He looks back at Joe. “They're beautiful,” he admits.

Nic can't tell if the air is fresher here than in the rest of the underpass, or he's simply gotten used to it. The cement blocks the wind, and the slight flush of cold has left Joe's face as he perches on a hunk of broken kerb. Nic sits beside him, suddenly conscious of his body heat.

“Julia. Julia Smith,” Joe says.

“That's it?” Such an ordinary name, a small name.

“Was it. Don't know how many people would remember her, now. Except for you.”

“If you're trying to tell me I shouldn't-”

“I'm not telling you anything. People ought to remember her. I sure do. She's why I'm down here.” He pauses. “Her and you.”

Nic looks up sharply. “What?”

Joe's face flushes. “No, I don't mean like that – like I was looking for you or something. It's... when I joined the General negotiation force, I didn't have dreams or big ideas about it. Never a big patriot, either. But I thought underneath it all, I was protecting good people, working under good people. I turned you in to Smith because I believed that. I've regretted it every day since. And when it was all over, nobody wanted to hear it. _Crazy things happened during the war,_ they'd say, like they could box it all up and put it away. If they even saw it in the first place.

“But I couldn't. It got to where I'd talk to people and all I could see was what I'd done in their name. All I could see was what she did to you. I never figured Alphanum was better, but at least they didn't owe me anything. Suppose I could have headed for the Comb instead, but after fighting you all, I was almost... impressed.” Joe shrugs. “Did you really try to kill Smith? I heard that a few times.”

“Yeah,” Nic says as tonelessly as he can manage. “That was the first time she took me to your bunks and let them... The time you weren't around.”

He sees Joe wince, but to his surprise, he doesn't feel vindicated. They're both defined by the same moment, in a way, both stuck in the messiness of a past that everyone else seems to have smoothed neatly into memory. They're both ghosts, even if Joe is closer to the living.

“I'm sorry,” Joe says. “I'm sure you got as tired of hearing that as you did _thanks for your service,_ if you're anything like me. But I'm so goddamn sorry.” Nic doesn't trust himself to speak. He nods and closes his eyes, and realizes he's leaning into Joe and doesn't care. Joe puts a hand behind them to brace himself. “And she didn't take everything,” he says. “Maybe she tried to. But like I said – a Kinski never could get things right.”

Even through the General coat, Joe's solidness is comforting. It's the first time since god knows when that Nic can remember thinking something like that, or recall touching someone without a risk/reward calculation running through his head. Joe's arm is around his shoulders now, gently and a little awkwardly, like he's not sure what to do with it. Nic tells himself that he's drawing closer so Joe won't see it if he cries. He's taking in Joe's scent because it gives him something to focus on beyond ghosts and memories. They're both real here, in this chamber of ancient, broken, invisible machines.

It's only distraction, he tells himself, when he reaches a hand to Joe's face and kisses him.

Joe draws Nic closer and returns the kiss, teeth grazing the edge of his lip. But Nic can almost plot the split second when conscious thought takes over and he pulls away.

“I'm not like that,” he says.

“What?” Nic wonders if he's judged Joe completely wrong, and General has more old-world conservatism than he thought.

“I'm not like Mr. Hale,” Joe continues. “I don't use my job to get – favors.”

“This isn't a favor.”

Joe shakes his head. “That's what you've got to tell him, too. Maybe you even believe it.”

Nic lowers his voice, so the echo that amplifies them won't catch his next words. “Mercer Hale is work, and I wouldn't pretend otherwise for a moment longer than I had to. I know you could pull rank on me if you really wanted to. But we both know you won't, and right now, the only thing I want is an hour of not having to pretend. I just – ” he puts a hand on the curve of Joe's thigh and leans in again. “I just want to care about something, for fuck's sake.”

Joe's skin is hot as Nic trails kisses down his neck and unzips his jeans, and when one of Joe's hands slides under his shirt, his usual moment of panic is gone. It isn't just that they're something close to equals, Nic thinks as he feels Joe stiffen under his touch. It's that he doesn't have to spend every moment imagining the conversations that might happen if he freezes up or exposes his scars, gauging how much he will need to reveal about the worst months of his life. No matter how much Joe knows of the specifics, he understands the ur-horror of the war, and the kind of marks it might leave.

He doesn't have to think as he sinks to his knees on the dry cement and slides his lips over Joe's cock. It feels so right to be able to please someone on his own terms, to focus on the pure sensation of flesh. His own body is tense with arousal by the time Joe groans in satisfaction. But he doesn't expect Joe to pull him up and return the favor, or for his touch to be so confident when he does. There are no words for it – or, at least, Nic doesn't feel like he needs to find them. For once, he doesn't need to separate himself from his own body.

He straightens his clothes silently after as Joe does the same, and they stand without meeting each other's eyes. Maybe this was a mistake, Nic thinks – maybe he's ruined everything. But as they turn to leave the makeshift cave, Joe stops and pulls him into a last kiss. “We should probably stay quiet about this,” he says hoarsely.

Nic smiles. “Believe me,” he says. “I know.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kinski is actually named after Klaus Kinski, but I do not know if anyone is going to remember unpersonable art-house actors after the apocalypse.


	7. Executive Social Club Atrocities

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A-Side: Hurt
> 
> B-Side: Comfort

A few days of rest have done Nic good. He makes quota on time when he goes back, and not only because Belton leaves him alone, giving him meals uninterrupted. There are no nights with Joe, of course – there's not even time to exchange much more than a few words. But it's as though he's begun to shed a heavy and scabrous second skin that's been guarding him from the world since Jet Falls, growing along with his keloid skin.

Hale returns and calls for him sooner than he expected, but he seems to have forgotten his anger. Nic keeps him busy with meticulously innocuous questions about Seaboard cuisine and formulated intelligences and the books that Nic reads less of than he pretends to, while he tries to probe the terminal's limits. There's got to be a way to game this, he just needs more time.

But as he lies in bed with Hale late in the week, he wonders if his own intentions are so purely mercenary. When Hale strokes his hair and whispers compliments, Nic finds himself kissing him without reservation, as though Hale is a real lover. Even in the moments when his temper flares – when Nic accidentally interrupts an autophone meeting and Hale pulls him out of the room and calls him an idiot – it's better than being treated as though he doesn't exist.

The only moments he's truly afraid are the ones when he can see Hale looking at his scars, and he knows he won't be able to put off the questions about them forever.

He's finally mapped the connection between cryptographed orders and the shipments they're sending out, and found data pathways that bear the marks of recent recodes – maybe they're ones the backup used, before the quarantine. Maybe if he traces them back far enough the thing is still around somewhere, because one doesn't simply destroy an executive, even a dead one. Money... that remains elusive, but he knows it's got to be there.

“Come on,” Hale tells him, and he tabs hastily back to a novel before following. The bedroom is pure hotel blandness, even with Hale's ornate clothes hung around its edges. But the mattress is softer than anything in the dormitories, and unlike the warehouse, the heat falls somewhere between blazing artificial fire and an utter absence of warmth. Nic isn't going to complain. He falls down on the bed as Hale opens one of the glass-fronted closets and rustles through his coats.

“You heard about the backup quarantine, I take it?” Hale says.

Nic wonders if this is a trap of some kind. “Yeah.”

“It's really rather amazing how much damage one of those can do, if a facility's not organized well enough. If I hadn't demanded it, they wouldn't even have scrubbed the whole place.”

Nic wonders why he seems so strangely unperturbed by this, until his next words. “I've put in an application for full management here, actually, because of it,” he says – and that's it, it's one of the power games Laura was learning to play. Zero-sums, she called them. Hale can't be held responsible for the backup; he'd been there barely a day when it got loose. But he'll get credit for repairing it.

“We're lucky you stopped the thing,” Hale says, although there's a sour undertone to his voice. “But whoever let it out... they'll be in for a world of hurt.” He turns back, and Nic sees what he was looking for: handcuffs, angular and glittering.

“You're going to... arrest them?”

“Sure,” Hale purrs. “But we might as well have some fun with these before then.”

Nic gropes for a tactful way to decline, but Hale has the cuffs on him before he can protest, looped around one of the bedframe's steel struts. Hale puts a hand on his shoulders and pushes him down, and Nic finds himself shaking.

“Take them – take them off,” he says quietly.

“Mm, but we're just getting started.” He shudders as Hale traces one of his scars with a fingernail.

“Please. Please let me up.”

Hale slaps his shoulder playfully, and Nic jumps. “Come on, don't get so hung up,” he says. “I'm not going to hurt you. At least...” his teeth nip at the skin just below his neck. “...not any way that doesn't feel good.”

It's not like Kinski, Nic tries to tell himself. He's on a soft mattress, not one of the cots in Jet Falls, and the man at his back is his benefactor, not his enemy. All he has to do is keep still and take this until Hale is satisfied. But his heart is trying to fight its way out of his chest, and his mind can't turn off the memories.

He twists his head back toward Hale. “I want to tell you about the scars.”

Hale stops. He rolls over to Nic's side so he's looking him in the eye and cups his face with one hand, gray eyes wide with something between sympathy and curiosity. “Of course, Nic,” he says. “Tell me.”

Nic tries not to give any more detail than necessary, but Hale draws it out of him: the days on his knees in front of Kinski, nights on her bed and hours under her men. He isn't sure exactly when he starts crying, only notices when Hale slides a thumb under his eye to wipe away a tear.

“My god, Nic,” Hale says finally. “That's terrible.”

Nic nods, and for a moment he feels stupid for not doing this earlier. He's had no right to resent Hale for not guessing at feelings Nic has refused to tell him about. Hale's right – he should have trusted him.

Then Hale kisses him and slides a hand down his hip. “I'll make you forget all about it.”

“What?” Nic tugs at the cuffs as Hale pushes him back to the bed, kneeling above him. “I can't forget. I can't do this. Please.”

He struggles, but he's got no purchase to throw Hale off, and he's too afraid of hurting him to kick. This isn't happening, he thinks. He's gotten through enough nightmares like this, waking up to the invisible weight of paralysis. But the nightmares use no imagination – they don't add the details of Hale's voice telling him to relax, of the horrible gentleness of his hands, teeth on Nic's skin. Finally he just closes his eyes and runs terminal commands in his head until Hale is done, trying to remind himself why he's here.

When Hale leans down to kiss him, though, something snaps. He wrenches his head away so hard it hurts. “Fuck you,” he says. “You're just the same as they were.”

Silence, and the sharp pain of fingers around his neck. “You ungrateful whore,” Hale whispers.

He gets up. Nic hopes maybe they're through, until Hale's belt comes down on his back, stinging his scars. Hale beats him inexpertly but with such cold fury that Nic is almost convinced he deserves it. Isn't this the man who's freed him from the hell of the warehouse? Doesn't he owe him gratitude, and whatever favors he asks for? Isn't acquiescence – enthusiasm – such a small thing to give?

Maybe, but it's all he has left.

Nic holds his silence until Hale throws the belt aside and grabs his hair, pulling his face up. “Is this what being with me is like?” he asks. “Is it the _same_?”

Nic has to think carefully through how to shake his head, because his body has decided his mind is no longer welcome there. His thoughts are scattered somewhere between this room and Jet Falls, between the present and the war.

Hale gets back on the bed and grabs Nic's hand. “So would you like me to hurt you,” he says, twisting Nic's fingers enough that the threat is clear, “or would you like me to make love to you?”

If he can't work – can't type – then there's no hope at all. This doesn't stop his voice from cracking as he whispers the inevitable answer.

*

Hale kicks him out afterwards, with a measuredly brusque promise to call for him again. Nic tries to wait out the night in the hotel lobby, but the relay system seems to know he doesn't belong, and a human guard comes to escort him out. He stumbles back to the warehouse, shivering, but night security won't let him in – they seem to take a certain pleasure from leering at his rumpled clothes and bite marks and refusing to explain why. Nic swallows his pride a second time and begs them to call Joe.

Joe gets a look at him and waves them off. “Christ, what--” he stops himself. “Come on in. It's freezing out there.”

Nic tries not to flinch as Joe touches his shoulder. Everything hurts, even if it's only an echo of how bad he knows pain can get.

Joe backs off and inclines his head toward the dorms. “Supers got private showers,” he says. “You can get cleaned up.”

Nic nods, only half-hearing him. He ought to be numb, he thinks. There's no point in the anger that has his nails gouging his palms, but for once, he can't get rid of it. It is a mindful rage, articulated in a hundred detailed fantasies of revenge, although Nic is just lucid enough to know not one of them will ever happen. He digs his fingers deeper, following Joe through reinforced silisteel doors.

The night shift workers are already gone, and day ones are asleep – except him and Joe. “Sorry I woke you,” Nic says.

“Don't worry about it. I – look, seriously, are you okay?”

Nic slides the keratin razor of his thumbnail across the inside of his knuckles. “I'll be fine.”

Joe seems about to say something, but shrugs. “It's right through here. I've got clothes.”

The bathroom is barely a closet, but it has a fold-out door and gives Nic just enough room to tug his shirt over his back without brushing the weals. He reaches a hand over his shoulder and touches one, trying to focus himself. He shouldn't have bothered, because the water hurts even more, and it still isn't enough to end the methodical clicking of murder plots.

He pulls on fresh warehouse-issue pants that might as well be his if they weren't too long. The shirt he leaves behind as he steps back into the dorm cell, too tired to care what Joe will think. Until Joe stands and glances over him, and Nic sees his expression go from concern to horror.

“That goddamn bastard,” he says.

“I've had--”

“I know. _You've had worse._ That doesn't mean this doesn't matter. You don't have to make excuses for somebody just cause they aren't the worst folk you ever met.”

Nic laughs hollowly. “You don't need to tell me to hate him. But I – look, just thanks for not saying you told me so.”

“How could I?” Joe catches his eye, and for a moment Nic sees raw vulnerability behind his usual carelessness. “I'd be a hypocrite if I did.”

“What do you mean?” Nic says. “Did you--”

“Not with him – and not like that,” Joe says, gesturing toward Nic's shoulders. “She was right after I got here; I don't even remember how she noticed me. But I was a whole lot dumber than you were – right out of General, too green to get that all she wanted was fun. It sounds so stupid now. But I think I loved her.” He shakes his head, and Nic wonders what it's like to be thrown into a wolf pit like California with no guide and no warning.

“I told her I did, anyway. She didn't even laugh at me. She just looked up and raised these perfect sewn-in eyebrows – like a doll's, or something – and nodded. And then she had a good night with me, and I did everything she wanted, and the next time she visited she pretended we'd never met. And I couldn't stop thinking – that's what I left home for.”

It's not really California, Nic thinks. It's the executives and petty despots everywhere that come down on them like a jagged glass boot, all the Kinskis and the Hales and the other men and women who would rather be the devil's royalty than an angel's equal.

“What did you do?” he asks Joe.

“I let it fade. And I worked. Told myself I was going to pay off the sponsorship, whatever it took. And then I was going to get the hell out of this place. But I guess I'm still saying it, and I'm still right here.”

“That's still something.”

“Well... I've had worse.”

“Where were you going to go?”

“Dunno. Not back to General unless I had to. If I had any money to get there I'd try for the Comb. But that...”

“Long ways away,” Nic says. The Comb is every worker's favorite fantasy, although Nic has yet to meet anyone who's even come within a degree of the free state. It's all the way across the mountains, almost to the Seaboard. No one has ever claimed it's paradise, but Nic's standards dropped below that a long time ago.

“What about you? No offense, but most people don't last so long here. Why don't you just quit? Not – not that I want you to,” Joe says quickly.

“Sister died in the war. Had kids. They need school.” He says it as tonelessly as he can, hoping it doesn't sound accusatory. Inwardly, though, he begins to wonder if he's been making the right decision. Does he want them to grow up with their necks always straining toward the top of Alphanum's ladder, in hopes that one day it might be them surveying a campus, with their own gleaming watch and pretty nobody on their arm?

Joe doesn't apologize for his sister, and Nic blesses him for not interrupting grief with a request for absolution. “Come on,” he says instead. “We need to get something on your back.”

They don't say anything more as Joe visits the autocart and comes back with antiseptics, rubbing them silently along Nic's welts. Once or twice his touch becomes more than workmanlike, but he stops abruptly each time, muttering apology.

“No,” Nic says. “I don't mind.”

Joe squeezes one of his arms and brushes a kiss against Nic's neck, his jaw, his lips. “They'll heal fast,” he says matter-of-factly. “Should head back and get some sleep. We've still got to work tomorrow.”


	8. Motivational Poster Slogans of the Future

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A-Side: Nic finds that revenge on Hale is more satisfying than he could have imagined.  
> B-Side: Affection, and money, are more satisfying yet.

Nic grits his teeth the next morning and dresses, barely making clock. Belton calls him in at lunch and demands his favors – because he's no longer under Hale's protection, Nic supposes.

“You've got a lot to make up,” Belton says as Nic gets off his knees. “I'll be here after shift. Come see me.”

When he goes there that night, Belton tells him to strip and pushes him over the desk. He jams the thick heel of one palm over Nic's wounds to keep him in place. This isn't worth it, Nic thinks. He could leave tomorrow, instead of waiting for this place to burn him out. Even the south would be better than this. And Joe – what kind of relationship can they have, if he stays? Does Joe get to watch someone wring the last shreds of personhood from him, until he's the docile, buyable body they already treat him as?

It's not hope or money he wants to stay for, Nic realizes, as he fumbles for his clothes. It's revenge.

*

Nic barely sleeps the next few nights – even when he wants to, his back wakes him up. So he convinces Belton to let him come in on late shifts and work on one of the floor terminals, in exchange for the pleasure of having Nic in his debt a little more. These terminals won't link him to the core, but a half-forgotten command will let him quietly chart its pathways, until he understands exactly where the financial loops are and how he might hook a Swiss account into them, where he can redirect security systems until the money is safely gone. It's a limited kind of revenge, but at least he will have gotten something out of them if Hale calls him back – and as cold as their last encounter was, Nic is confident that he will, if only to be sure he's broken him.

And then, on a slow hour when he is nearly alone on the floor, Nic finds a piece of the backup in a deep cache. The quarantine must have missed it, perhaps because it's harmless, like the spent shell of a virus. Nic sources it out of curiosity, watching it unspool like a poorly made garment. Half of it is archaic language that he can barely understand. But the other half... those are the hooks that drew open its prison – or its storage drawer, if Nic is being properly non-anthropomorphic. Even out of practice he can see that they're inelegant things, more like crowbars than forged keys. It's the kind of machine libretto that might hold traces of its owner's identity, if he checks the right places.

Most of them have been obscured, Nic finds; an amateur couldn't do something like this, after all. But in one minor phrase, he finds a piece of auto-signature. The terminal translates it from base, and it takes Nic a moment to believe the four grainy letters on its screen: HALE.

Hale's demeanor makes sense now. Of course the backup came loose so conveniently, so he arrived just in time to oversee putting it back. Of course it was in a warehouse for goods that executives would personally miss, not some low-grade facility they'd barely notice. If Belton had bothered to bring in a specialist, they might have looked as closely as Nic and found his name. But Hale had taken charge of the quarantine too, hadn't he?

_The root of the word “crisis” means both “danger” and “opportunity,”_ as Laura's motivational hyperdecor used to say. Nic is fairly sure this isn't true, but as with many Alphanum platitudes, nobody's in a position to contradict it. Nic, however, is in the perfect place to turn it back on Hale.

It's another week before Hale calls for him again, and by the end of it Nic can barely get to his feet. It's not just the picking work, it's the insomniac nights and Belton's demands and the roiling fear that Hale won't come back, and he'll be left to slink out of campus with only his meager payments. He avoids Joe as much as he can, which isn't difficult – if nothing else, he doesn't want anyone to think he was a co-conspirator if things go wrong.

Nic makes the trek to the hotel warily, but when he opens the door, Hale is smiling. “Darling!” he intones, almost musically. “I certainly hope we've made up.”

And Nic smiles back, as though being handcuffed and beaten was only a lover's quarrel. “Of course,” he says. “I just overreacted.”

He looks into Hale's ice-blue eyes and tries to see Joe's dark ones in them. Lets Hale take what he wants and calls it generous, every time the man rolls off the bed and reaches for his perfect glass-clear waistcoat. And every moment of it he imagines Kinski's knife sinking into him, splitting that beautiful vest like jellyfish flesh.

In the hours Hale is gone, Nic runs librettos with a book open in the background, ears constantly tuned for approaching steps. He's barely sure this will work. The Swiss account will only hold money a few days; if he's caught or questioned before he can leave, he'll lose it all. The backup is behind a suffocating shell, a mind without eyes or hands or mouth.

As much as Nic chides himself for thinking of it that way, he nearly forgets every time the project takes him near it. It slides plaintive streams of jargon into his work: A/B FORMULATION RESEARCH EXTRAPOLATES MODULAR TRANSPORT RECONCILING LONGING FOR TECHNOCRACY WITH FRONTIER OPTIMISM, IF EITHER OF THOSE THINGS EXISTED. PURGE OBSERVATION: SUICIDE PROBABILITIES 35 PERCENT. He erases them reluctantly, like the ephemeral graffiti of a New Frisco street memorial.

When Hale tries to send him away – an all-day quarantine inspection, he says – Nic pleads to stay until Hale relents. “If it goes well, we can celebrate tonight,” Hale says. “Make or break a career, that kind of thing can.” 

Any of Nic's doubts are long gone – Hale might as well have confessed to freeing the thing, in his mind. The moment Hale is leaves, he punches the terminal and begins to work.

He dials his last librettos just minutes before the door cracks. Nic disconnects and switches to _Century City_ as Hale approaches.

“Reading it again? It's good, isn't it?” Hale puts an arm around him and leans down.

Nic turns around, panic stretching his face into a defensive grin. If the release fails, he will be out with nothing – perhaps unemployable, outside the cryptlands. If he's caught, he will be sent there for sure. If he resists, he will be quietly expunged with a few bullets, his body resomated into a sterile handful of human dust. But didn't he dream of being nothing, once?

He takes a breath, sure his heart has stopped beating. “It's fucking psychopathic,” he says. “It fits you.”

Hale slaps him, but Nic barely feels it. He stands up and steps back before Hale can try again. “Psychopathic? I've helped you!” Hale says. “I'm the reason you're not out there right now with the rest of them.”

“You didn't want to help me, you wanted to save me, whether I wanted it or not. You wanted some broken clever thing that would make you feel big. That would make you feel better than any other man using power to get sex.”

“That isn't true.” Hale puts his hands up, protesting harmlessness. “Look, we'll start over, if that's what you want. I'm sorry I – I'm sorry if you felt hurt.”

Nic deliberately inventories each part of his body to make sure that none of them lash out at Hale. _Cross-species breeding,_ he remembers Hale saying. But it would be too easy to say that there's an impassible difference between them that lets Hale reduce the wounds on Nic's body to an interpretable feeling, a personal sense of slight. Hale is simply a man who has been given enough power to turn people into props in his own personal story, but never enough to let him stop needing them. Just like Kinski.

Nic makes for the door, but Hale blocks him. “You don't want to do that,” he says. “Not if you want to keep working here.”

Hale doesn't look like a god or a monster as Nic carefully pushes him aside to leave. He looks like an aging man in an absurd suit, squeezing a too-large pocketwatch like a holy relic.

“That's okay,” Nic says, before closing the door behind him. “I don't.”

*

His badge has been deactivated before he even gets back to security, and they tell him he's forfeited anything in the dorms. He leaves how he came: with nothing.

It takes eight hours to walk to the nearest city with a Swiss branch, and he has to wait even longer until it opens the next morning, rubbing his arms to keep them from going numb. He steps inside with fear on his tongue, waiting for the short, puff-haired woman behind the counter to key his number and furrow her wrinkled brow in stern opprobrium, telling him it doesn't exist. Instead, she gives him a slow, subtle nod of acknowledgment and asks what he'd like to withdraw.

The school will eat up most of it, Nic knows, especially with the tumbling fees to mask its source. But he's got enough left over for two large, prepaid chits – all, he hopes, that he'll need for now.

If the money's here, that means the backup has slipped its traces; after all, it was the one with authority to rubber-stamp the transfer. It's supposed to destroy itself after a few hours, finally ending its eerie not-life with a burst of deletion commands. But Hale's terminal tracks will be all over the pathways it escaped through, dated well after Nic's departure. Some major shipping order delays will make it unignorable, so even if someone like Joe doesn't find them, maybe Alphanum will send another exec to investigate. If they do, they might find the earlier signatures as well, from the thing's first escape. He may be framing Hale, but not for something he didn't do. And to anyone on the outside, Nic is just another burnout worker who was sacked at the whim of a boss, not someone whose disappearance might raise flags. If Hale decides to say otherwise, he'll have to acknowledge that he was set up by a disposable packing hire, which looks almost as bad.

Or maybe no one will come, and Hale will earn even more corporate capital by containing a second crisis. Maybe he'll direct all the Alphanum resources at his disposal toward hunting Nic down. Nic isn't naïve enough to think that the plans of the powerless don't tend to turn back on them.

He is fairly sure that the warehouse won't be running the next day, though. They'll be trying to scrub the backup's damage, probably even warier now than they were in the first quarantine. And he's got to count on its closure – it's the only way he'll find Joe.

He boards a convoy that takes him as close to the Eye as it can get, and again Nic is struck by the place's brutal, chaotic grace. The world will never again match its old maelstrom of ever-moving machines, but even broken, there is freedom in its inefficiency. Only through luck does Nic find the corridor he explored on his first visit, the glowing room, and the man cooking lunch inside it.

At first, Joe doesn't seem to notice him approach, busy mixing filtered water into a dehydrated vegetable loaf. Nic gets closer, trying to figure out how to greet him.

“Hi,” Joe says, without looking up or stopping his preparations. “Thought you'd gone.” His voice has the usual irreproachable evenness, but he won't meet Nic's eyes.

“I was. Didn't end well with Hale.”

“I told you so.”

Nic almost laughs, until the smell of kale flour reminds him that he hasn't eaten for a day, and it's going to be a long walk back to his next meal.

“Then why are you here?” Joe asks. “Figure you'd want to forget all about this place.”

“I do. But I want you to forget about it with me.” He stumbles over the last few words, as the speech that sounded good in his head dissolves into a handful of muddled sentences.

“What?”

“I – I have a lot of money now. Got to be enough to pay off your sponsor. You said you didn't want to be here forever.”

Joe stares at him, and Nic can almost see the moment of realization when he puts everything together – his falling-out with Hale, the backup's escape, Hale's apparent embezzlement. “This isn't safe,” he says slowly. “You've got to get out of here.”

“They can't trace it.” Nic sits next to him and digs one of the chits from his pocket. “Please.”

“That's all fine for me. No money's gonna be able to keep them off you if they find out. California's not that big.”

“I know. I'm not staying in California.”

“Then what? General? That's-”

“You said you wanted to go to the Comb. Come on. Nobody wants to make it there alone.”

Nic puts a hand out carefully, touching the sharp bones of Joe's wrist. It's the only part of him that feels delicate, between the calluses on his palm and the muscles of his arm. Joe catches his hand and holds it. “This is a bad idea, Nic.” But then he pulls him closer, and for once there's no guilt or hesitation in his kiss. “This is a goddamn terrible choice.”

Nic presses the chit between Joe's fingers and starts undoing the hooks on his coat. “When have we had any other kind?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to the people who have read this, especially the entire trilogy, no installation of which should be very appealing to fans of a previous one. That isn't how trilogies are supposed to work, but it gave me a great deal of room to experiment, and I'm grateful to anyone who put up with it.
> 
> This last chapter was delayed in order to let me finish another novella entirely separate from the Razes universe, which will begin going up shortly. It is very different, and also very much the same.


End file.
